Coming Home
by pistachiomacaroons
Summary: Looking into the eyes of a Weeping Angel has brought back Donna Noble's long-lost memories, and going back to her Doctor may just be simpler than it seems. However, not everyone wants the woman who saved the world alive… Journey's End fix-it, Donna/Ten friendship.
1. I

**Hello, hello! I'm Cam, and this is the start of what I think is going to be a looooong story. This is a really, really crappy time to start a story, considering I'm going on hiatus until November 30th and all, but I'll come back to this then. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to R+R! ;v;**

For what seemed to be the millionth time that day, Donna Noble let out a great, heaving sigh. Her day had been full of disturbances, disappointments, and general boredom. First, everyone at the office had stared at her when she went to make her coffee (sadly, there was no more Lance to make it for her), because, according to them, she'd had a golden glow emanating off her body. Literally. ('Might want to tone down on the bronzer, dearie,' Nerys had said.)

Ridiculous. As _if _she could ever glow golden. She wasn't an alien. Although, speaking of aliens, they'd done a generous part in ruining her day, too. Actually, they'd ruined this whole entire _month, _starting with what she called the Pepper Pot Invasion, in which a bunch of planets had apparently shown up in the sky, and pepper pot-lookalike robots had apparently come down from them to demand that the human race become their slaves. Of course, the Earth had, God knew how, prevailed, but not all seven billion people on it came out unharmed.

Because that was the day Donna had lost a year of memories.

Her parents had insisted it had something to do with the evil pepper pots, despite the surgeons' denial. She remembered her first few days of work at H.C. Clements as if it was yesterday (notably, Lance, the head of Human Resources, making her coffees), but beyond that point, and until she had woken up to find an extremely skinny, strange man with hair that probably defied gravity in her living room, who was apparently named _John Smith _of all things, talking about flying pepper pots with eyestalks, all was blank.

_Daleks. Daleks. They want supremacy. They kill._

Donna stopped walking toward the park, startled. There was that voice again… the one that ruined everything for her. It seemed to lack proper grammar, and apparently thought it was an encyclopedia for all things alien. Every time something odd popped up, and aliens were mentioned, the voice would chant a name, each stranger than the last, into her head, and belt out its characteristics.

Very surprisingly, the voice sometimes worked in her favour. When, last week, huge humanoid creatures with their brains practically popping out of their forehead flesh had strolled into her office, the voice had rung in her head: _Ood. Ood. Slave aliens. Give orders, they'll listen._

Sure enough, when she'd told them to sod off, they had, not looking quite as manic as they had when they walked in.

(Still quite ugly, though.)

Shaking the voice out of her head, she continued walking, and stepped into the park. She knew Nerys had made a rather rude comment this morning about her eating too much, but she bloody _loved _the ice-cream shop across the park from here, and nothing would stop her from getting her daily fix of Neapolitan ice cream, so—

That's when she stopped dead in her tracks, because the voice in her head rang louder than ever.

_Weeping Angel. Don't blink. Don't look away. Don't turn back. They kill._

She opened her eyes as wide as she could. She had no reason to doubt the voice, since it had saved her once before, and the other reason she had not to blink was that, in the square, a statue had laid its eyes right on her.

She didn't understand why it was called a Weeping Angel. Sure, the statue showed similitude to an angel, with its wings, but it wasn't weeping. It was staring. To be honest, it was getting kind of creepy.

_You'll be weeping by the time I'm done with you, sunshine._

The voice called her back to attention with a shout along of the lines of '_You lost focus! Don't blink! Not now!'. _A split second later, she saw why.

The statue—no, actually, it _definitely _wasn't a statue—was now only inches away from her face, its mouth half open, displaying a horrifying set of fangs.

It was all Donna could do not to scream and run, but somehow she continued staring.

She stared, she stared, and she felt like hours were elapsing. She struggled to keep her eyes open, forcing them not to close with her fingers.

Blank, stone eyes stared back, mere inches away from her face, the fangs still threateningly close.

_Don't blink, don't blink, don't blink. Don't look away. They kill. Don't blink._

Then, Donna understood what it felt like to be weak in the knees, and, still unblinking, collapsed to the ground as she remembered.

As memories of Midnight and Pompeii and the Daleks and the blue box that had taken her farther than she could ever have dreamed of washed over her, crushing her, it occurred to her that she, Donna Noble, part human and part Time Lord, had _saved the world. _Clearly, when the Doctor had wiped her memory, he thought he was taking away her Time Lord mind, too, but no such luck – it had stayed, and the voice, the compressed alien-thing dictionary in her head was _him_! She still had all the Doctor's knowledge, and now, she had regained her own, too. She almost laughed out loud at the sheer joy of reuniting with her memories, minus, seemingly, the risk of frying her brains, but then she remembered the Weeping Angel that was frighteningly close to her.

Her fingers flying back to her eyelids, forcing them to remain open, she slowly got up and backed away.  
"All right, rock alien thing from outer space," she muttered, "I'm sure we can work this out."  
As she slowly walked backwards, going slightly right, her eyes never leaving the Weeping Angel, she bumped into something beside her, feeling the warmth of a body.

"Oi, git," she cried reflexively, "watch your ste—"

That's when the person next to her, who also happened to be her best friend/tormentor/whatever she was, also known as Nerys, screamed, and before Donna could see the other Weeping Angel dead in front of the blonde and cry _don't blink_, Nerys was gone. Vanished into thin air. Instinctively, she turned toward the spot where she had been, but it was as if she had never been there.

Her heart almost stopped when she realized she'd looked away from the Weeping Angel, but nothing happened. She was still staring at the same old Londonian cracked pavement below her, and when, slowly, slowly, she looked up, she found the two Angels staring at each other.

_If they're staring at each other, they can't move. This is the end of two Weeping Angels._

The voice in her head seemed less rushed and clearer, now, and although it sounded like the Doctor, it occurred to her, her Time Lord mind working a mile a minute, that this couldn't be the Doctor – she had no mental connection to him. It might have been the other Doctor, but she couldn't see how he could still be overseeing her life – he was busy with Rose, literally a world away. As far as she knew, he was human and had no way to contact her. This left only one possibility: the voice in her head had been coming from her Time Lord mind, which had been repressed for the past year. Or, at least, if the ideas were not her own, they were the knowledge the Doctor had left behind with her. Suddenly, she had an idea – one that was genuinely and surely her own, this time.

"Oh, you're not getting rid of me that bloody easily, Spaceman," she muttered as she headed at full speed for her flat, in which she was sure she could find the solution to seeing her Doctor again.


	2. II

**AN: Phew! I decided to not put this on hiatus, after all. Too invested in it. So, I did look all over the DVD box, but it doesn't say anywhere that I own Doctor Who. Sigh. Ask me after I've murdered Steven Moffat.**

**Also, I didn't mention this, but this story is simply stuffed with Journey's End spoilers. Don't wanna be spoiled, don't read, yeah?**

**Enjoy!**

Donna spent half an hour just looking up his name on her search engine, finding shady links, none remotely close to him (even though the man with whom he shared a name, and whose Facebook page she had stumbled upon, was really quite attractive). In exasperation, she closed all but one tab and added the word 'Torchwood' to her search. The first thing that came up was Torchwood's website.

Now, why hadn't she just thought of that earlier?

She clicked on the link, feeling her heart sink when she found it required a password.

Without even noticing it, she felt her fingers hit the keyboard and punch in 'TARDIS'. The page opened up, the banner stating 'Welcome to Torchwood'. She let out a quiet whoop. How had she ever survived all her life without Time Lord instincts?

Swiftly, she looked up his name on the website, finding what she believed to be his phone number in no time. She punched the number into her phone, pressing the call button. The answer came almost right away.

"Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood, at your service," the man on the other end of the line purred. She rolled her eyes at the familiar tone, and at the odd power that Jack was, for lack of a better word, gifted with – he made literally _every _sentence that came out of his mouth sound suggestive.

"Save the flirting, you twit. It's Donna. I want you to tell me everything you know about—"

"Donna?" Jack cried, interrupting her. "_Donna Noble?_ We thought you were as good as dead - or human, whatever – when the Doctor wiped your mind after your brain started frying! How'd you get out of that?"

Donna scowled. "Oi! If you'd just let me _speak_, I could tell you how this happened. Are you going to?"

"Sure. Spill the beans."

Donna silently wondered how the hell one could say a sentence that involved a gas-inducing vegetable and make it sound like it came straight out of a porno flick.

"There isn't much to spill. I just sort of ran into a Weeping Angel and the Time Lord voice in my head saved my life—"

"Youran into a _Weeping Angel_? And _survived_?" She couldn't see him, but she was sure that Jack was spreading out his arms in complete incomprehension.

"Shut up and stop interrupting me! Anyhow, I looked at it and it gave me back my memories and then there was another Weeping Angel and it made someone disappear and—" she stopped for a quick breath, starting to speak even louder when Jack started to interrupt her, "—and they stared at each other and apparently, they can't move when they do that. _So_," she practically shouted before he could interrupt her again, "I need you to tell me everything you know about the Weeping Angels."

"Weeping Angels, Weeping Angels," Jack hummed, the rustling of paper being heard over his voice. "Don't have much about them, here. You'll be the third person to live to tell the tale. Congrats."

"Who're the other two?"

"The Doctor and Martha. The Angels sent them back to 1969 and they had this girl send them the TARDIS from the present, talking to her through movie Easter eggs. Pretty ingenious idea, really."

"So, what _do _you know about them?"

"Well, not much. We kind of have to trust everything the Doctor says, if we want to have more than one sentence of information." He paused. "Well, we know that if anything living, including themselves, as you've learned, sees them, they literally turn to stone. If nothing's looking at them, they can move at lightning speed, and if they touch you, they send you back to any random place in time. Kind of brings a whole new meaning to 'touched by an angel', huh?"

Donna scowled, getting up and starting to pace. "D'you think, if they touched someone, and an attraction field popped up somewhere in space and time, your travelling could be… redirected?"

"That's probably possible, but don't go getting ideas. It's not a theory that's been tested. Unless some really powerful, ancient force came into play, I doubt anything could stop you from being shipped off to the past."

"Yeah, yeah."

A long silence on both ends of the line sunk in.

"Oh, and Donna?"

"What?"

He paused, and she could almost hear him smiling.

"If you do anything stupid—"

"It's not stupid, it's bloody _brilliant_. And it's going to work, you hear me?" Donna snapped, wondering how Jack could doubt her. "Trust me. I'm part Doctor."

"I was going to say, before you interrupted, if you do anything stupid, tell the Doctor I say 'hi'."

"I don't know whether I could say it like that. Would make me sound like I want to sleep with him. See you around, you prawn."

"See you in hell."

_Click._

She muttered Jack's name a few seconds after he hung up, followed by a long silence.

"I guess that settles it, then."

All was quiet, in the park, except for Donna's uneasy breaths.

It was as her inner Time Lord voice had predicted – the Angels had not moved an inch since the afternoon. She took a step, for a second, wondering if she wouldn't rather be the Angels' staring contest's audience of one.

No, she told herself, she _couldn't_. She had to find the Doctor. So, what, if she ended up in 1930 instead of in the TARDIS, attracted by Huon particles she still had in her (obviously, if she apparently glowed gold, she had more than enough)? 1930's fashion was nice.

(The Great Depression wasn't, but she was willing to overlook that.)

She sighed, silently said goodbye to the twenty-first century in case she didn't come back around, and stepped between the Angels, closing her eyes.

She screamed.

Traveling through time and space without a ship, she decided, felt a lot like being pulled through an extremely narrow subway tube filled with jagged, white-hot rocks. She certainly wouldn't be pulling that one again for a while.

She thought, when she opened her eyes, once, that she caught a flicker of an empty field going on for miles, a scarecrow somehow waving at her in the distance, before she blinked, and, with a burst of golden dust, opened her eyes to a familiar aqua and copper glow.

She'd made it! She was inside the TARDIS! She almost let out a little squeal of excitement, until she saw a sight that completely crushed her mood.

There was another Donna, not two feet away from her, and the Doctor was peering straight at them both – no, _glaring _would have been a better word choice - with a cold look that sent chills down her spine.

"Oi!" the Donnas and the Doctor cried out in unison, looking at each other.

"Oh, _not _this," the Doctor snapped. "Haven't any of you read the Shadow Proclamation's Act on Duplicity? You're _not _allowed to fraudulently make me believe she died. I know she's alive. I saw her very recently. Now," he continued, walking over to where they were and kicking the TARDIS door open to a gorgeous nebula, "leave. Go on, both of you!"

"Oh, no, you don't!" Donna – the Donna who had just been touched by a Weeping Angel just to get to her Doctor – stormed over to the Doctor. "I took _huge _risks to come here, and now you're telling me to go home? I _can't_ go home, Doctor! Don't you understand? After all we've done…" She shook her head, disgusted. "I don't know who 'she' is, and I've never read an act from the Shadow Proclamation in my life, nor do I know what it is, but I do know you ought to _stop being daft and recognize me already!"_

The Doctor, unfazed by the fact that Donna's face was now inches away from his, pulled out his sonic screwdriver and began to silently wave it over Donna.

"_Stop beeping me!_" Her shriek fell on deaf ears, and the Doctor did the same thing to the other Donna, poking both of the Donnas around and scowling. Finally, his face lit up, and he briskly walked out of the control room, only to promptly come back with a large bottle of transparent liquid, unceremoniously dumping half of its contents onto Donna's head, much to her protest.

"Oh my God, that's _vinegar_! The smell's never going to come out! You're going to regret that, time boy!" Her screaming was, once again, ignored. She followed him, but the only thing he did was empty the rest of the bottle onto the pseudo-Donna's head, making the real Donna get a glimpse of how ridiculous she must have looked.

Well, she wasn't worrying about that, so much as the fact that the other Donna was disintegrating before her eyes, screeching.

"Slitheen," the Doctor mumbled. "Disintegrate at the touch of acid."

Needless to say, watching oneself disintegrate is not an experience Donna now wished on anyone.

In the time for her to get lost in her thoughts, the Doctor had already gone back to the control panel, staring at the touch screen, and his eyes slowly lighting up before he ran up to Donna and engulfed her in a hug, laughing and not seeming to care about the vinegar all over her.

"Donna Noble, you are absolutely _brilliant,_" he half-shouted. "Brilliant! Human and Time Lord – that's what the scan says! You got the Time Lord part of your brain to get out of its dormant state. How did you even get here?"

Donna stepped away, chuckling. "Let's not get vinegar all over you, Martian." He shrugged, showing he had absolutely no concern for staining the pinstripe suit he wore just about all the time. Or maybe he had different suits, all identical? It was one of those things that the Doctor kept a mystery for reasons unknown and completely confusing to anyone but himself. "I hitched a ride with a Weeping Angel," she stated simply, feeling proud of her successful gamble. "Figured the few Huon particles left in me might redirect my trajectory to gravitate and ultimately land near the heart of the TARDIS. It was a bit daft, now that I think back, I could have landed in the TARDIS from nine-hundred years ago, or on any old TARDIS in Gallifrey, or in a parallel universe—"

"Well, it worked, didn't it?" The Doctor, she realized, would not let his parade be rained on. She tried another angle.

"By the way, how long has it been, since you last saw me? The whole memory-wiping, post-Dalek invasion thing you had going on there. Also, what kind of name is John Smith? Come on. Who actually names their child John Smith?" She rolled her eyes at him.

"I'll have you know," the Doctor retorted, one eyebrow raised, "I chose that when there were only a handful of John Smiths on Earth. Oh, and it's been—" he checked his watch, "—four human hours since the end of the Dalek siege. Hence, about an hour since I wiped your memory." He scowled. "Yeah, I never realized that. How did you remember everything that fast without having your brain implode? And how did you figure everything out within the hour? I'm impressed, honestly."

Donna let out a sound of surprise. "An hour? I guess I didn't win out the battle with that git alien statue entirely. It'd been a year since I'd seen you."

Worry flashed across the Doctor's face. "Any headaches? Weird stuttering? Mind blanks?"

"Oi! Calm down, none of those have actually happened. Why is it more worrying for Donna-from-the-future than it is for Donna-from-an-hour-ago?" She scowled, her brain now filled with questions. "Why was that Slitheen pretending to be me, earlier? Who were you referring to when you were saying that she was trying to convince you that someone was dead? _What's going on?_"

The Doctor frowned, thinking for a minute, before pathetically replying.

"Donna, go take a shower."  
"But—"

"I don't want the TARDIS to smell like vinegar the rest of the week. She'd never forgive me. So go on! To the shower," he insisted, practically shooing her out of the control room.

Donna stomped away to her old room, promising herself that she'd get to the bottom of this, and she'd do it soon.


	3. III

_AN: Hello, my lovely armadillos! (I'm never saying that again.) Sorry it's been so long - this story is still kind of on a hiatus, and I'm caught up in... things. Yes, things. Like watching Supernatural and Sherlock and grossly sobbing. Things. Also, there's a warm batch of brownies on the counter. Review, and you're getting one, yeah? Please? I'm desperate over here._

_Also, I don't own Doctor Who. I've checked all over the box and everything. Damn. Bless whoever does, though._

Donna Noble was screaming. Screaming, and no one could hear her. Everyone was gone or mad or unhelpful, and she felt panic washing over her.

She was screaming at them to _come back come back please come back_-

Her eyes snapped open, and her breathing slowed. Her eyes were uncomfortably irritated and her throat felt like she'd just snacked on sandpaper, and she shoved her face into her blanket, hiding from her embarrassment. Had she been screaming in her sleep? That was just ridiculous.

As if to confirm Donna's suspicions, the Doctor walked into the room without knocking, worry etched onto his face, as it had been earlier, when she'd told him she'd travelled back in time to meet him. Without a word, he sat down on the edge of her bed, and it wasn't until Donna had made some half-hearted snarky comment about his coming into her room unannounced in the middle of the night that he asked her what was wrong. And for a long time, Donna did not answer, her eyes closed, looking like she was still stuck in her nightmare.

"I can still hear them in my sleep," Donna breathed. "I heard them every night, before…" She trailed off, probably not wanting to utter the words 'before you wiped my ruddy memory'. "I had a break from that for awhile." A hint of bitterness crept into her voice, but it faded as quickly as it had come. "But they're back." She buried her face into her blanket once again, voice trembling and so quiet that the Doctor almost failed to hear it. "I couldn't save them."

There was a long silence before the Doctor broke it with a soft 'Who?' even though he perfectly well knew who, that she was referring to her particularly painful experience in the Library.

"The children," Donna spit out, as though admitting this physically pained her.

Her categorical refusal to call the children her own was not lost on the Doctor. "It was a dream, Donna," he whispered. "They never existed. Reality was collapsing. It's not your fault." He murmured more soothing words into her hair, but she didn't hear them, too busy holding back tears.  
"I know it's daft. Just… I thought I was through with this." She heaved a sigh into the silence. "Why are you so worried about me?" Donna half-rolled her eyes at the Doctor's already overlarge eyes, widened at her. "You won't stop getting that look on your face, since earlier."

The Doctor scowled. "Technically, your brain should have imploded hours ago, taking you along with it. I reckon I have a right to be a bit _worried_, Donna."

"Yes, but you've been looking at me like I'm _dying_. D'you have to do that? Coming from a time-traveller, it's a bit unsettling."

"I tried to go back, Donna," he blurted out, his face looking pained. "I tried to go back and stop you from absorbing my DNA. Time can be rewritten." He took a deep breath. "I tried to stop you from losing all those memories in the end. But I couldn't. Believe me, I would've much preferred the other way, where you didn't have to forget me. But I failed." He looked down, seemingly not able to bear looking her in the eyes.

She had no clue if he was expecting sympathy, but expecting it or otherwise, he got none. Rather, he got a formidable smack in the face, à la Donna. He at least had the courtesy to look shocked.

Damn, she'd missed doling those out.

"You dunce! You absolute, utter _dunce_!" Donna sat up, looking around the room, furious (probably for something to throw at a wall in sheer frustration, and if she didn't find anything soon, that something would end up being the Doctor). "You _knew_, didn't you? You knew the universe would collapse if you messed up the timeline, if you made everything not happen. _But you tried it anyway,_" she cried incredulously. "What about personal timelines? Don't you care about the rest of the universe?"  
"Donna," the Doctor muttered. Clearly, he did not think he stood a chance at getting a word in when faced with the wrath of Donna Noble.

"If you did that, you could've gone back and taken me _straight to my bloody wedding_, and that way, I wouldn't have anything to do with you!" Donna flopped back down onto her pillow, letting out a groan of frustration.

The Doctor knew she didn't mean a word of it, having been exposed to too many of her tirades, but he couldn't help feeling a bit hurt, being put below Donna's ex-fiancé, who had, after all, tried to murder after pretending to love her for months.

"Do you want to go home?" he asked lamely, feeling defeated. Donna rolled her eyes at him, sighing.

"Yeah, why not? I'd _love _to be sent back home within _hours _of seeing you again." She threw him a skeptical look and risked a tiny smile. "I risked my skin to get here, Spaceman. It's not for nothing."

"Why, then?"

"Well, I like travelling with you. You're not getting rid of me that soon. And besides, I know what's out there in space. I dreamed of it at night. I couldn't just _not _go to see it. I'm not through with this life yet, time boy." She closed her eyes, leaning against her pillow and stretched. "You're gonna show me the universe. That is, if I can get to sleep tonight." She blinked, looking at ease, but not as tired as she should feel in the middle of the night. Truth was, she couldn't decide whether she was completely awake or overwhelmingly tired. Was it always like this, for Time Lords?  
The Doctor pressed his hand to her forehead. "I'm sure you will."

She flinched away from his hand, pushing his arm away. "I've got a Time Lord mind, Spaceman. I can send myself off to sleep if I want. It's just not comfortable. Kind of feels like my head is being compressed." She shook her head. Sleeping didn't feel right any more – she understood why the Doctor almost never slept, but she was so, so tired… "One more thing before I knock myself out. What was that Slitheen doing in the TARDIS? I sensed that it was dying, but…"  
The Doctor sighed. "All sorts of dying aliens disguised as you have come to me to die in the past few hours. I suppose they want to make me believe you're dead, so I wouldn't need to keep an eye on you." He took off his glasses, which Donna hadn't even noticed he was wearing, and suddenly looked angry.  
"But why?"

"They want a clear coast. Not everyone sings songs of Donna Noble, apparently." He frowned thoughtfully off into the distance. "You're safe here." He didn't look convinced, but Donna closed her eyes and curled into her blanket.

"Good night, Spaceman."  
"Sweet dreams, Donna." And, with that, the Doctor was gone.

"See you tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow."

It was to be noted that Donna's last thought before she fell asleep was that she'd never have the heart to tell the Doctor that her brains were slowly starting to burn out all over again.


	4. IV

**Hello again, my dollop lollipops! ... oh, the nicknames are just getting worse, aren't they? Sorry. Also sorry for being away for so long... besides, a dollop lollipop would look all weird and... blobby. Forget I mentioned it. On the other hand, I've two announcements. The first is that for Christmas, I've gotten an iPod Touch as a collective gift, which means I can now write on the go! Yaaaay! Now, if you see a midget maniacally laughing while typing on their Notes app, you have the right to bludgeon them with a baseball bat, 'cause it's probably me! ... wait, on second thought, don't do that. Probably not the best idea. Anyway, number two is that I've now got a blog where I'll be putting story previews, updates on when I'll updates, and answer any questions that you're willing to throw at me. It's pistachiomacaroons . tumblr . com and it's gonna be totally awesome, so stay tuned with it!  
Also, don't forget to review! I get really happy, when you review! So happy, in fact, that you get a free TARDIS chunk when you do! Then, you can start your own adventures in time and space! Yay!**

**Okay, now to the story... onwards!**

"… But it was a dragon! An actual, proper _dragon_!"

Donna, lying slumped against the TARDIS console, was somehow still managing to sound entirely excited.

They'd spent the day on an island swallowed up whole by volcanic debris – except there was no volcano on the island. When they'd gone to investigate, they'd found an alien had scorched what was once New Hawaii (what was it with humans, the Doctor had wondered, and making everything _new_?) and had a face-to-face with said dragon-like creature. It had become irritated by the Doctor waking it up and had tried to blast them to smithereens. They'd only made it back to the TARDIS just in time, and with a legendary sprint, too. Donna had decided that, for a first adventure on her new new trip with the Doctor, as adventures went, today hadn't been too bad.

"It's called a pyroledregian. That's where the legend of dragons came from. They can speak, but they mumble. The last time I ran into one was on Earth, in the age of cavemen… said it was a pyroledregian but I understood 'pyro-dragon'. So that's the name I told to your apes." He shrugged.

Donna laughed, shaking her head. "Wait. Are you telling me that _you _started the legend of dragons? That's just rubbish." She gave him a highly skeptical look, complete with an exaggerated head tilt.

"Who says I didn't?"  
"No one here to say you did."  
"There's me!"

"Well, you don't count. You're a self-important Martian."

"I'm not _self-important_! I know how good I am, is all." The Doctor pouted, crossing his arms and glaring at Donna.

Her head was too busy spinning and pounding and being generally mistreated by the Time Lord part of her for her to even take notice of his mock sulking. She hadn't told him of her newly returned mind burnout, because he hadn't for a minute stopped acting as if she was about to die or get seriously injured all the time – but he couldn't know, could he? He hadn't heard her say anything. Something told her she must have had about a month left. If she tried hard enough, though it did hurt, the numbers floating through her mind became clearer, like focusing on a dull image… yes, there were twenty-seven days. Twenty-seven days until she had to lose all her memories again…

"Donna!" The Doctor waved a hand in front of her face, scowling. "I'd say 'Earth to Donna', but you know…" He chuckled, for once unaware of her troubles. In turn, she let out a weak laugh.

"Can we go home?" she asked suddenly.

She'd rather die with the Doctor, in some heroic way or other, than die back on Earth. This, she told herself, would be her last visit.

There was always the other way out, she told herself. She could spend the rest of her natural, human life with her family, if she wanted the Doctor to erase her memory. She could go back to being plain old mousy unremarkable _invisible_ Donna, jumping between jobs and eating crisps and watching soap operas. She could go back, erase the next twenty-seven days completely. But, in comparison to this, what was home? Home used to be such a comforting, warm word, but when she had started travelling with the Doctor, it had become listless and dull. Why go back to that tiny, insignificant little dot when there was so much more to see? She had all of time and space at her disposal – she didn't see why she'd want to go to twenty-first century Chiswick as opposed to, say, running away from dragons with the greatest trouble magnet in the universe and his blue box.

Okay, that wasn't a fair comparison. Usually, her days were better. Well, maybe no more than half of them, but still.

Nonetheless, she convinced herself, she'd rather die a thousand times over than go back to mediocre old Earth for the rest of her days. Twenty-seven days of the Doctor and the whole wide universe was worth infinitely more than sixty more years of humanity.

"After all this?" The Doctor's voice snapped her back to reality, and he sounded a bit nostalgic. Donna gave him a blasé eye-roll.  
"Why'd you always think I mean forever? I just want to see my family, you dunce." She tried to take on her usual dry tone, but failed miserably.

Now, when Donna Noble cannot be sarcastic, the Doctor knows all is not well. But, in this case, Donna got a rare stroke of luck and he either overlooked it entirely or was too much of a dunce to notice it. However, he did flinch slightly at the word _dunce_, and Donna guessed that he hadn't entirely forgotten the previous night's tirade.

He mouthed an 'oh' and nodded. "Tomorrow, then? I had plans for this evening."

"Plans, as in what? Escape by the skin of our teeth from aliens for the second time in a day?"  
The Doctor shook his head, grinning. "Figured you wouldn't appreciate that… nah, we're going to the nicest beach on this planet. I've something to show you." As usual, he played around with the controls vaguely, the silence only broken once in a while by Donna's 'turn off the handbrake, you moron's and the Doctor's indignant '_I'm _the one who taught you to fly her, I think I know what I'm doing's until they landed.

The Doctor performed his customary 'after you' ritual, and Donna, preparing to burst out the door, stopped short when she opened it.

"Longest beach on the universe. Miles and miles long. The most beautiful place on this galaxy," she said quietly. "You took Rose here, a long time ago. That's when you realized…" She trailed off, feeling her gut twist when she was about to pronounce the words 'you loved her'.

"Yeah," he breathed, his voice suddenly sounding hoarse. "But watch this. We're right on time.  
Donna didn't even have time to ask 'on time for what?' before her breath hitched in her throat.

Every colour of the rainbow and more were splayed in the seemingly endless sky in undecipherable patterns, giving everything below a mysterious glow. Undoubtedly, it was the most beautiful thing Donna had ever seen. In the millions of languages now at her disposition, she failed to find a single word to describe this and the warmth that seemed to be seeping into her at the sight, comforting her, making all her problems seem minuscule.

"Blimey," she muttered, "you don't mess around when you're trying to impress a girl, do you?" She thought of how blown away Rose must have been at the sight. In fact, she _knew _Rose had found this as absolutely fantastic as she found it. She smiled at the vague memory that wasn't hers – Rose, speechless, and not taking her eyes off of the sky for a single moment, and the Doctor grabbing her hand and feeling like he was the luckiest being in the whole damned universe. She winced, feeling guilty for intruding upon the Doctor's thoughts like this, but shook the thought out of her mind as she heard a rustling at her feet. As she looked down, she found the Doctor to be setting out a picnic blanket. She snorted with laughter, feeling immensely better than she had.

"A picnic on a beach at _sunset_, Spaceman? And the most beautiful sunset in the universe, no less! That's so human. I told you from the first – you're not mating with me."

The Doctor raised one mocking eyebrow. "You're the one who kissed me."

"_You were bloody dying._" Donna's tone was only half-joking, but her smile didn't fade.

"Well, then. I'm not looking to mate with you either, if that helps," the Doctor retorted, bemused, as he set out some plates made out of a material Donna had never seen.

"Stage one: denial," Donna stated, letting out a dry laugh.

It was nice to have a friend—and, no matter how much she insisted that _some _part of him fancied her and how much he was confused by her marked lack of interest for him, _just _a friend.


End file.
